Mises Daily, 30 de Novembro de 2012

"First of all, is there really austerity in the eurozone? One would think that a person is austere when she saves, i.e., if she spends less than she earns. Well, there exists not one country in the eurozone that is austere. They all spend more than they receive in revenues.

In fact, government deficits are extremely high, at unsustainable levels, as can been seen in the following chart that portrays government deficits in percentage of GDP. Note that the figures for 2012 are what governments wish for."

Mises ESCRACHANDO em uma crítica a livro de Rothbard

In every chapter of his treatise, Dr. Rothbard, adopting the best of the teachings of his

predecessors, and adding to them highly important observations, not only develops

the correct theory but is no less anxious to refute all objections ever raised against

these doctrines. He exposes the fallacies and contradictions of the popular

interpretation of economic affairs. Thus, for instance, in dealing with the problem of

unemployment he points out: in the whole modern and Keynesian discussion of this

subject the missing link is precisely the wage rate. It is meaningless to talk of

unemployment or employment without reference to a wage rate. Whatever supply of

labor service is brought to market can be sold, but only if wages are set at whatever

rate will clear the market. If a man wishes to be employed, he will be, provided the

wage rate is adjusted according to what Rothbard calls his discounted marginal value

product, i.e., the present height of the value which the consumers — at the time of the

final sale of the product — will ascribe to his contribution to its production.

Whenever the job seeker insists on a higher wage, he will remain unemployed. If

people refuse to be employed except at places, in occupations, or at wage rates they

would like, then they are likely to be choosing unemployment for substantial periods.

The full import of this state of affairs becomes manifest if one gives attention to the

fact that, under present conditions, those offering their services on the labor market

themselves represent the immense majority of the consumers whose buying or

abstention from buying ultimately determines the height of wage rates.

Less successful than his investigations in the fields of general praxeology and

economics are the author's occasional observations concerning the philosophy of law

and some problems of the penal code. But disagreement with his opinions concerning

these matters cannot prevent me from qualifying Rothbard's work as an epochal

contribution to the general science of human action, praxeology, and its practically

most important and, up to now, best-elaborated part, economics. Henceforth all

essential studies in these branches of knowledge will have to take full account of the

theories and criticisms expounded by Dr. Rothbard.

The publication of a standard book on economics raises again an important question,

viz., for whom are essays of this consequence written: only for specialists, the

students of economics, or for all of the people?

To answer this question we have to keep in mind that the citizens, in their capacity as

voters, are called upon to determine ultimately all issues of economic policies. The

fact that the masses are ignorant of physics and do not know anything substantial

about electricity does not obstruct the endeavors of experts who utilize the teachings

of science for the satisfaction of the wants of the consumers. From various points of

view, one may deplore the intellectual insufficiency and indolence of the multitude.

But their ignorance regarding the achievements of the natural sciences does not

endanger our spiritual and material welfare.

It is quite different in the field of economics. The fact that the majority of our

contemporaries, the masses of semi-barbarians led by self-styled intellectuals, entirely

ignore everything that economics has brought forward, is the main political problem

of our age. There is no use in deceiving ourselves. American public opinion rejects

the market economy, the capitalistic free-enterprise system that provided the nation

with the highest standard of living ever attained. Full government control of all

activities of the individual is virtually the goal of both national parties. The individual

is to be deprived of his moral, political, and economic responsibility and autonomy,

and to be converted into a pawn in the schemes of a supreme authority aiming at a

"national" purpose. His "affluence" is to be cut down for the benefit of what is called

the "public sector," i.e., the machine operated by the party in power. Hosts of authors,

writers, and professors are busy denouncing alleged shortcomings of capitalism and

exalting the virtues of "planning." Full of a quasi-religious ardor, the immense

majority is advocating measures that step by step lead to the methods of

administration practiced in Moscow and in Peking.

A aterrorizante história da dívida trilionária do governo britânico

Capitalism and the historians

[não achei em .pdf esse parágrafo está na introdução, escrita por Hayek]

"The actual history of the connection between capitalism and the rise of the proletariat is almost the opposite of that which these theories of the expropriation of the masses suggest. The truth is that, for the greater part of history, for most men the possession of the tool for their work was an essential condition for survival or at least for being able to rear a family. The number of those who could maintain themselves by working for others, although they do not possess the necessary equipment, was limited to a small proportion of the population. The amount of arable land and of tools handed down from one generation to the next limited the total number who could survive. To be left without them meant in most instances death by starvation or at least the impossibility of procreation. There was little incentive and little possibility for one generation to accumulate the additional tools which would have made possible the survival of a larger number of the next, so long as the advantage of employing additional hands was limited mainly to the instances where he division of the tasks increased the efficiency of the work of the owner of the tools. It was only when the larger gains form the employment of machinery provided both the means and opportunity for their investment that what in the past had been a recurring surplus of population doomed to early death was in increasing measure given the possibility of survival. Numbers which had been practically stationary for many centuries began to increase rapidly. The proletariat which capitalism can be said to have “created” was thus not a proportion of the population which would have existed without it and which it had degraded to a lower level: it was an additional population which was enabled to grow up by the new opportunities for employment which capitalism provided. In so far as it true that the growth of capital made the appearance of the proletariat possible, it was in the sense that it raised the productivity of labor so that much larger numbers of those who had not been equipped by their parents with the necessary tools were enabled to maintain themselves by their labor alone; but the capital had to be supplied first before those were enabled to survive who afterward claimed as a right a share in its ownership. Although it was certainly not from charitable motives, it still was the first time in history that one group of people found it in their interest to use their earnings on a large scale to provide news instruments of production to be operated by those without them could not have produced their own sustenance."

Sobre a Grécia mas vale para tantos

"A weak currency not only makes necessary imports more expensive, reducing prosperity, but it also is an outright subsidy to foreign buyers of a nation's goods"

A maioria deve decidir tudo?

A Terra.A Mente Humana.

A Terra que se foda

Por Andrew Klavan

Dia 22 de abril é o Dia da Terra, e para homenagear esta ocasião, eu gostaria de dizer que por mim, a Terra que vá para o inferno.

A Terra – para aqueles que ainda não perceberam – é uma rocha condenada a uma lenta espiral eterna em um caldeirão de plasma explodido que, por falta de um nome melhor, nós chamamos de sistema solar. Existe apenas uma única coisa interessante ou digna à respeito deste pedaço de entulho espacial condenado: ele proporciona as condições necessárias para manter a vida. (Diga-se de passagem, a chance de isso ocorrer seria ridiculamente impossível se Deus não existisse – tão impossível que cientistas foram obrigados a inventar todo tipo de cenários bestas de multi-universos com o único propósito de se convencerem que Deus não existe. Mas isto é problema deles e irrelevante para mim.)

Então a Terra mantem a vida. Yuuupi! E existe apenas uma coisa interessante e digna à respeito da vida – só uma – e esta coisa é a mente humana.

“Cacete, o Klavan está falando de Cultura”, você deve ter pensando, ou mesmo dito – porque, vamos ser sinceros, você é um tipo bem esquisito de gente – quero dizer, basta olhar pra você. De qualquer maneira, “Duplo Cacete”, você deve estar dizendo, “como é que você pode dizer que a mente do homem é a única coisa interessante e digna à respeito da vida? E quanto a beleza de uma gazela correndo? E a nobreza do voo de uma águia? E o impressionantemente impressionante céu sobre as ondas âmbar chocando-se nas montanhas roxas sobre planícies com pomares? E quanto aqueles sonhos glaceados recheados com creme? Eu amo esses sonhos de padaria!”

Primeiro de tudo, pare de falar tanta coisa, este blog é meu. E dois, não existe nenhuma beleza, ou nobreza, ou algo impressionantemente impressionante – nem mesmo o sabor de um sonho de creme – fora da mente humana. A ciência ainda não se decidiu, mas a própria realidade pode ser em parte um produto da mente humana pois há alguns aspectos do mundo que não parecem se resolver até que os observemos. Mas de qualquer maneira, a gazela estaria em disparada por nada, a águia seria uma máquina alada de comer, os céus e as ondas e as montanhas seriam sonhos sem sonhadores se o homem não estivesse aqui para contempla-los.

No momento que você percebe isso, tudo muda. Você não se preocupa mais com o esgotamento de recursos energéticos da Terra, porque você percebe que não existem recursos energéticos – nunca existiram – existe somente formas variadas de matéria que nossas mentes, a mente do homem, transforma em recursos energéticos para nosso prazer e comodidade. Eles nunca irão se esgotar enquanto estivermos aqui, porque nossa mente não tem limites e irá inventar mais.

Você não se preocupa mais com poluição, porque você sabe que assim que pessoas livres se incomodem com isso, outras pessoas livres resolverão o problema com motores de combustão menos poluentes e filtros. Onde está o fog londrino? Onde está a neblina de Los Angeles? Onde está a neve dos últimos anos? Ok, eu só tinha curiosidade sobre este último.

Você não se preocupa mais com a Terra, porque a Terra está aqui para nós, e não o contrário. A Terra não é nada além do local que vivemos – por enquanto. Devemos mantê-la razoavelmente limpa e agradável. Mas uma obsessão doentia por uma limpeza impecável te transforma em um repressor pentelho – ou um ambientalista – e torna a vida das pessoas menos confortável, não mais.

Sempre pratiquei atividades na natureza. Eu passeio. Eu pesco. Eu corro pelas florestas reproduzindo cenas do filme O Amante de Lady Chatterley. Ou eu fazia isso, antes de ser impedido por uma ordem judicial. Eu acredito que uma precaução razoável pelo bem do ambiente deveria balancear a busca do lucro daquelas pessoas incríveis que nos proporcionam toda a maravilhosa energia que precisamos. Eu acredito que podemos chegar nesta precaução razoável enterrando todos os ambientalistas que conseguirmos encontrar até o pescoço e jogando mel na cabeça deles para atrair formigas. Vocês gostam de formigas, não gostam? Então aí está um ótimo jeito de celebrar o Dia da Terra!

A Terra não está aquecendo de forma catastrófica. Extração de petróleo não causa terremotos. Devemos encontrar e usar cada gota de petróleo que conseguirmos – há o suficiente para mais alguns séculos, época em que estaremos vivendo na Alfa Centauro, abastecendo nossos carros voadores com papel higiênico ou páginas velhas da biografia de Barack Obama ... desculpem a redundância.

Então que se foda o Dia da Terra. Eu gostaria de declarar hoje – e todos os outros dias – o Dia da Mente do Homem. Celebre isto – promova isto – glorifiquem isto – porque a Terra, podem acreditar em mim, vai se virar sozinha.

Andrew Klavan é um premiado autor e roteirista de Hollywood.

Tradução de Fernando Chiocca

O original em inglês se encontra aqui.

basicamente: a economia livre implica alguma "perda" de soberania, mas uma soberania EXCENDENTE e mal-colocada CONTRA o povo que deveria legitimar o Estado, para começo de conversa. Ou seja, é salutar o "enxugamento" desse Estado.

"A verdade sobre a soberania

 

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CAMBRIDGE – No recente debate sobre o tratado orçamental europeu, que teve lugar no Parlamento francês, o governo socialista de França negou veementemente que a ratificação do tratado iria minar a soberania francesa. O tratado não coloca “nenhuma coacção a nível da despesa pública”, afirmou Jean-Marc Ayrault, o primeiro-ministro. “A soberania orçamental permanece no parlamento da República Francesa”.

Illustration by Chris Van Es

Enquanto Ayrault tentava tranquilizar os seus colegas cépticos, incluindo muitos membros do seu próprio partido, o comissário europeu responsável pela concorrência, Joaquin Almunia, distribuía uma mensagem semelhante aos seus colegas sociais-democratas, em Bruxelas. Para ter sucesso, argumentou, a Europa tem de provar aos que acreditam na existência de um conflito entre a globalização e a soberania, que estão errados.

 

 

Ninguém gosta de abrir mão da soberania nacional, muito menos, ao que parece, os políticos de esquerda. No entanto, ao negar o facto evidente de que a viabilidade da zona euro depende de restrições substanciais da soberania, os líderes europeus estão a enganar os seus eleitores, atrasando a europeização da política democrática e elevando os custos políticos e económicos do irrevogável resultado.

 

 

A zona euro ambiciona a integração económica total, o que implica a eliminação dos custos de transacções que impedem as atividades comerciais e financeiras transfronteiriças. É óbvio que isso requer que os governos rejeitem restrições directas no comércio e nos fluxos de capital. Mas também requer que harmonizem as suas regras e regulamentos internos – tais como as normas de segurança dos produtos e regulamentações bancárias – com os de outros Estados- membros, a fim de garantirem que não funcionarão como barreiras comerciais indirectas. E os governos devem repudiar mudanças nestas políticas, para evitarem que a incerteza funcione, ela própria, como um custo de transacção.

Tudo isto estava implícito na iniciativa do mercado único da União Europeia. A zona euro foi mais longe, tendo como objectivo, através da unificação monetária, erradicar totalmente os custos de transacções associados às moedas nacionais e ao risco das taxas de câmbio.

 

 

Simplificando, o projecto de integração europeia articulou restrições à soberania nacional. Se o seu futuro está agora em dúvida, é porque a soberania constitui um obstáculo, mais uma vez. Numa verdadeira união económica, sustentada por instituições políticas de toda a união, os problemas financeiros da Grécia, de Espanha e de outros, não teriam atingido as proporções actuais, ameaçando a existência da própria união.

 

 

Veja o exemplo dos Estados Unidos. Ninguém se lembra de registar, digamos, o défice da balança das transacções correntes entre a Florida e o resto do país, embora possamos seguramente imaginar que é enorme (desde que o estado se tornou no lar de muitos reformados que vivem de rendimentos provenientes de outros lugares).

 

 

Quando o governo do estado da Florida vai à falência, os bancos da Florida continuam a funcionar normalmente, uma vez que estão sob jurisdição federal e não sob jurisdição estatal. Quando os bancos da Florida se afundam, as finanças do estado não ficam afectadas, uma vez que os bancos são, no fim de contas, da responsabilidade das instituições federais.

 

 

Quando os trabalhadores da Florida ficam desempregados, as prestações de desemprego chegam de Washington, DC. E quando os eleitores da Florida estão desencantados com a economia, não provocam distúrbios fora da capital do estado; pressionam os seus representantes no Congresso para avançarem com mudanças nas políticas federais. Ninguém diria que os EUA têm uma soberania em abundância.

 

 

A relação entre a soberania e a democracia também é mal interpretada. Nem todas as restrições ao exercício do poder soberano são anti-democráticas. Os cientistas políticos falam sobre “delegação democrática” - a ideia de que uma força soberana possa querer “atar as suas mãos” (através de compromissos internacionais ou delegação para agências autónomas), a fim de alcançar melhores resultados. A delegação da política monetária a um banco central independente é o exemplo típico: ao serviço da estabilidade dos preços, a gestão diária da política monetária está isolada da política.

Mesmo que as limitações selectivas sobre a soberania possam aumentar o desempenho democrático, não há garantia de que todas as limitações implícitas na integração do mercado fá-lo-ão. Na política interna, a delegação é cuidadosamente calibrada e restrita a algumas áreas onde os problemas tendem a ser extremamente técnicos e as diferenças partidárias não são grandes.

 

 

A verdadeira globalização que engrandece a democracia iria respeitar estes limites. Iria somente impor restrições, que são consistentes com a delegação democrática, possivelmente com um número limitado de normas processuais (tais como transparência, prestação de contas, representatividade, utilização de evidências científicas, etc.) que melhoram a deliberação democrática no próprio país.

Tal como ilustra o exemplo norte-americano, é possível abrir mão da soberania - como Florida, Texas, Califórnia e outros estados dos EUA fizeram - sem abdicar da democracia. Mas combinar a integração do mercado com a democracia exige a criação de instituições políticas supranacionais que sejam representativas e responsáveis.

 

 

O conflito entre a democracia e a globalização torna-se intenso quando a globalização restringe a articulação interna das preferências políticas sem uma expansão compensatória do espaço democrático, a nível regional / global. A Europa já está no lado errado da fronteira, como indica a instabilidade política em Espanha e na Grécia.

 

 

É nesse ponto que o meu “trilema” político se manifesta: Nós não podemos ter globalização, democracia e soberania nacional em simultâneo. Das três devemos escolher duas.

Se os líderes europeus querem manter a democracia, devem optar entre a união política ou a desintegração económica. Também devem escolher entre renunciar explicitamente à soberania económica ou utilizá-la de forma activa para o benefício dos seus cidadãos. A primeira implicaria dizerem a verdade aos seus próprios eleitores e construírem um espaço democrático acima do nível do Estado-nação. A segunda significaria desistirem de união monetária, de modo a conseguirem implementar políticas nacionais, monetárias e fiscais, ao serviço de uma recuperação a longo prazo.

No fim de contas, quanto mais tempo esta escolha for adiada, maior será o custo económico e político a ser pago."

The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science [ de Mises]

[Nona Seção do Capítulo Quarto]

The Examination of Praxeological Theorems

The epistemologist who starts his lucubrations from the

analysis of the methods of the natural sciences and whom blinkers

prevent from perceiving anything beyond this field tells us

merely that the natural sciences are the natural sciences and

that what is not natural science is not natural science. About the

sciences of human action he does not know anything, and therefore

all that he utters about them is of no consequence.

It is not a discovery made by these authors that the theories of

praxeology cannot be refuted by experiments nor confirmed by

their successful employment in the construction of various gadgets.

These facts are precisely one aspect of our problem.

The positivist doctrine implies that nature and reality, in

providing the sense data that the protocol sentences register,

write their own story upon the white sheet of the human mind.

The kind of experience to which they refer in speaking of

verifiability and refutability is, as they think, something that

does not depend in any way on the logical structure of the human

mind. It provides a faithful image of reality. On the other hand,

they suppose, reason is arbitrary and therefore liable to error

and misinterpretation.


 

This doctrine not only fails to make allowance for the fallibility

of our apprehension of sense objects; it does not realize that

perception is more than just sensuous apprehension, that it is an

intellectual act performed by the mind. In this regard both

associationism and Gestalt psychology agree. There is no reason

to ascribe to the operation the mind performs in the act of becoming

aware of an external object a higher epistemological dignity

than to the operation the mind performs in describing its own

ways of procedure.


 

In fact, nothing is more certain for the human mind than

what the category of human action brings into relief. There is

no human being to whom the intent is foreign to substitute by

appropriate conduct one state of affairs for another state of affairs

that would prevail if he did not interfere. Only where there is

action are there men.


 

What we know about our own actions and about those of other

people is conditioned by our familiarity with the category of

action that we owe to a process of self-examination and introspection

as well as of understanding of other peoples' conduct.

To question this insight is no less impossible than to question

the fact that we are alive.



 

He who wants to attack a praxeological theorem has to trace it

back, step by step, until he reaches a point in which, in the chain

of reasoning that resulted in the theorem concerned, a logical

error can be unmasked. But if this regressive process of deduction

ends at the category of action without having discovered a vicious

 

link in the chain of reasoning, the theorem is fully confirmed.

Those positivists who reject such a theorem without having

subjected it to this examination are no less foolish than those

seventeenth-century astronomers were who refused to look

through the telescope that would have shown them that Galileo

was right and they were wrong.

O primeiro mercantilista...

Se no último texto que colocamos aqui no blog tivemos Juan de Mariana, extremista libertário, que instado a escrever um livro para agradar Felipe II, da Espanha [livro dedicado ao filho deste,Felipe III], resolveu fazer uma defesa franca do TIRANICÍDIO, elencou vários tiranos e os colocou como tais, bem como resolveu afirmar que a soberania do Rei vem do povo, na contramão da então crescente apologia ao poder concentrado. Já em outro livro denunciou a prática de alterar o conteúdo das moedas para ganhar um "extra" e,explicitamente, considerou a prática como criminosa. Ou seja, fazer média não era com Juan de Mariana.

 

Em contraste a esse grande homem, apresentamos Carafa, mercantilista, protecionista e que adorava bajular poderosos e, afinal, começou a pensar em termos de "agregados", "indução da economia", entre outras excrecências . A fonte é a mesma do texto anterior [o link está lá, o excerto é da terceira seção do sexto capítulo], que é o importantíssimo livro de Rothbard sobre o pensamento econômico anterior a Adam Smith.

 

"The Florentine humanists of the early fifteenth century had been optimistic for man, for his quest for

virtus (or virtu) or excellence, and for the 'honour, praise, and glory' which more traditional Christians had thought due only to God. It was therefore easy for the later, sixteenth century humanists to transfer that quest for excellence and glory from individual man to being the sole function of the prince. Thus Castiglione declares that the courtier's chief goal, 'the end to which he is directed', must be to advise his prince so that the latter may attain 'the pinnacle of glory' and make himself 'famous and illustrious in the world' .

 

The earlier republican humanists had nurtured the ideal of 'liberty', by which they meant, not the modern concept of individual rights, but republican, generally oIigarchial, 'self-government'. Castiglione expressly condemns such old notions, on behalf of the monarchical virtues of peace, absence of discord, and total obedience to the absolute prince. In The Book of the Courtier, one of the characters in the dialogue protests that princes 'hold their subjects in the closest bondage' so that liberty is gone. Castiglione shrewdly counters, in age-old terms used in numerous apologia for despotism, that such liberty is only a plea that we be allowed to 'live as we like' rather than 'according to good laws'. Since liberty is only licence, then, a monarch is needed to 'establish his people in such laws and ordinances that they may live in ease and peace' .

A leading writer of advice-books to both the prince and the courtier, and a man who bears the dubious distinction of being perhaps the first mercantilist, was the Neapolitan duke, Diomede Carafa (1407-87). Carafa wrote The Perfect Courtier

while serving at the court of Ferdinand, king of Naples, in the 1480s, as well as "The Office of a Good Prince" during

the same period. In The Perfect Courtier, Carafa set the tone for Castiglione's enormously influential work a generation later. In his

Office of a Good Prince, Carafa set the model for the form of economic advice presented by consultant administrators. As in many later works, the book begins with principles of general policy and defence, then goes on to administration of justice, to public finance, and finally economic policy proper.

In detailed policies, Carafa's advice is relatively sensible, and not nearly as totally power-oriented or as statist as later mercantilists advising fully fledged nation-states. The budget should be balanced, since forced loans are comparable to robbery and theft, and taxes should be equitable and moderate in order not to oppress labour or drive capital from the country. Business should be left alone but, on the other hand, Carafa called for subsidies of industry, agriculture, and commerce by the state, as well as substantial welfare expenditures. In contrast to the later mercantilists, foreign merchants, declared Carafa, should be made welcome because their activities are highly useful to the country.

 

But there is no hint in Carafa, in contrast to the scholastics, of any desire to understand or analyse market processes. The only important question was how the ruler can manipulate them. As Schumpeter wrote of Carafa: 'The normal processes of economic life harbored no problem for Carafa. The only problem was how to manage and improve them'.

 

Schumpeter also attributes to Carafa the first conception of a national economy, of the entire country as one large business unit managed by the prince. Carafa was,

so far as I know, the first to deal comprehensively with the economic problems of

the nascent modern state the fundamental idea that Carafa clothed in his conception

of the Good Prince of a National Economy... [which] is not simply the

sum total of the individual households and firms or of the groups and classes within the borders of a state.

It is conceived as a sort of sublimated business unit,

something that has a distinct existence and distinct interests of its own and needs to be managed like a big farm. "

I

The learned extremist: Juan de Mariana

One of the last Spanish scholastics was a Jesuit but not a Salamancan. He was the 'extremist' contemporary of Molina and Suarez, Juan de Mariana (1536-1624). Mariana was born near Toledo, of poor and humble parents. He entered the great University of Alcahi in 1553, shone as a student, and a year later was received into the new Society of Jesus. After completing his studies at Alcala, Mariana went to the Jesuit College at Rome in 1561 to teach philosophy and theology, and after four years moved to Sicily to set up the theology programme at the Jesuit college there. In 1569, Mariana moved to teach theology at the great University of Paris, at the remarkably young age of 33. After four years, ill health forced him to retire to live in Toledo; ill health, however, often does not necessarily mean a short life, and Mariana lived to the then phenomenally ripe old age of 88.

 

Fortunately, Mariana's 'retirement' was an active one, and his great learning and erudition drew numerous persons, from private citizens to state and ecclesiastical authorities, to ask for his advice and guidance. He was able to published two great and influential books. One was a history of Spain, written first in Latin and then in Spanish, which went into many volumes and many editions in both languages. The Latin version was eventually published in 11 volumes, and the Spanish in 30. The Spanish edition has long been considered one of the classics of Spanish style, and it went into many editions until the mid-nineteenth century.

 

The other notable work of Mariana, De Rege (On Kingship), was published in 1599, written at the suggestion of King Philip II of Spain and dedicated to his successor Philip III. But monarchy did not fare well at the hands of the hard-hitting Mariana. A fervent opponent of the rising tide of absolutism in Europe, and of the doctrine of such as King James I of England that kings rule absolutely by divine right, Mariana converted the scholastic doctrine of tyranny from an abstract concept into a weapon with which to smite real monarchs of the past. He denounced such ancient rulers as Cyrus the Great, Alexander the Great, and Julius Caesar as tyrants, who acquired their power by injustice and robbery. Previous scholastics, including Suarez, believed that the people could ratify such unjust usurpation by their consent after the fact, and thereby make their rule legitimate. But Mariana was not so quick to concede the consent of the people. In contrast to other scholastics, who placed the 'ownership' of power in the king, he stressed that the people have a right to reclaim their political power whenever the king should abuse it. Indeed Mariana held that, in transferring their original political power from a state of nature to the king, the people necessarily reserved important rights to themselves; in addition to the right to reclaim sovereignty, they retained such vital powers as taxation, the right to veto laws, and the right to determine succession if the king has no heir. It should already be clear that it was Mariana, rather than Suarez, who might be called the forebear of John Locke's theory of popular consent and the continuing superiority of the people to the government. Furthermore, Mariana also anticipated Locke in holding that men leave the state of nature to form governments in order to preserve their rights of private property. Mariana also went far beyond Suarez in postulating a state of nature, a society, previous .to the institution of government.

 

But the most fascinating feature of the 'extremism' of Mariana's political theory was his creative innovation in the scholastic theory of tyrannicide. That a tyrant might be justly killed by the people had long been standard doctrine; but Mariana broadened it greatly in two significant ways. First, he expanded the definition of tyranny: a tyrant was any ruler who violated the laws of religion, who imposed taxes without the people's consent, or who prevented a meeting of a democratic parliament. All the other scholastics, in contrast, had located the sole power to tax in the ruler. Even more spectacularly, to Mariana any individual citizen can justly assassinate a tyrant and may do so by any means necessary. Assassination did not require some sort of collective decision by the entire people. To be sure, Mariana did not think that an individual should engage in assassination lightly. First, he should try to assemble the people to make this crucial decision. But if that is impossible, he should at least consult some 'erudite and grave men', unless the cry of the people against the tyrant is so starkly manifest that consultation becomes unnecessary.

 

 

Furthermore, Mariana added - in phrases anticipating Locke's and the Declaration of Independence's justification of the right of rebellion - that we need not worry about the public order being greatly disrupted by too many people taking up the practice of tyrannicide. For this is a dangerous enterprise, Mariana sensibly pointed out, and very few are ever ready to risk their lives in that way. On the contrary, most tyrants have not died a violent death, and tyrannicides have almost always been greeted by the populace as heroes. In contrast to the common objections to tyrannicide, he concluded, it would be salutary for rulers to fear the people, and to realize that a lapse into tyranny might cause the people to call them to account for their crimes. Mariana has given us an eloquent description of the typical tyrant at his deadly work:

 

He seizes the property of individuals and squanders it, impelled as he is by the unkingly vices of lust, avarice, cruelty, and fraud .... Tyrants, indeed, try to injure and ruin everybody, but they direct their attack especially against rich and upright men throughout the realm. They consider the good more suspect than the evil; and the virtue which they themselves lack is most formidable to them...They expel the better men from the commonwealth on the principle that whatever is exalted in the kingdom should be laid low... They exhaust all the rest so that they can not unite by demanding new tributes from them daily, by stirring up quarrels among the citizens, and by joining war to war. They build huge works at the expense and by the suffering of the citizens. Whence the pyramids of Egypt were born... The tyrant necessarily fears that those whom he terrorizes and holds as slaves will attempt to overthrow him.... Thus he forbids the citizens to congregate together, to meet in assemblies, and to discuss the commonwealth altogether, taking from them by secret-police methods the opportunity of free speaking and freely listening so that they are not even allowed to complain freely

....

 

 

This 'erudite and grave man', Juan de Mariana, left no doubt what he thought of the most recent famous tyrannicide: that of the French King Henry III. In 1588, Henry III had been prepared to name as his successor Henry of Navarre, a Calvinist who would be ruling over a fiercely Catholic nation. Facing a rebellion by the Catholic nobles, headed by the duc de Guise, and backed by the devoted Catholic citizens of Paris, Henry III called the duke and his brother the cardinal to a peace parley into his camp, and then had the two assassinated. The following year, on the point of conquering the city of Paris, Henry III was assassinated in turn, by a young Dominican friar and member of the Catholic League, Jacques Clement. To Mariana, in this way 'blood was expiated with blood' and the duc de Guise was 'avenged with royal blood'. 'Thus perished Clement', concluded Mariana, 'an eternal ornament of France'. The assassination had similarly been hailed by Pope Sixtus V, and by the fiery Catholic preachers of Paris.

 

The French authorities were understandably edgy about Mariana's theories and at his book De Rege. Finally, in 1610, Henry IV (formerly Henry of Navarre, who had converted from Calvinism to the Catholic faith in order to become king of France), was assassinated by the Catholic resister Ravaillac, who despised the religious centrism and the state absolutism imposed by the king. At that point, France erupted in an orgy of indignation against Mariana, and the parlement of Paris had De Rege burned publicly by the hangman. Before executing Ravaillac, the assassin was questioned closely as to whether reading Mariana had driven him to murder, but he denied ever having heard of him. While the king of Spain refused to heed French pleas to suppress this subversive work, the general of the Jesuit Order issued a decree to his society, forbidding them to teach that it is lawful to kill tyrants. This truckling, however, did not prevent a successful smear campaign in France against the Jesuit Order, as well as its loss of political and theological influence.

 

Juan de Mariana possessed one of the most fascinating personalities in the history of political and economic thought. Honest, gutsy and fearless, Mariana was in hot water almost all of his long life, even for his economic writings. Turning his attention to monetary theory and practice, Mariana, in his brief treatise De Monetae Mutatione (On the Alteration ofMoney, 1609) denounced his sovereign, Philip III, for robbing the people and crippling commerce through the debasement of copper coinage. He pointed out that this debasement also added to Spain's chronic price inflation by increasing the quantity of money in the country. Philip had wiped out his public debt by debasing his copper coins by two-thirds, thereby tripling the supply of copper money.

 

Mariana noted that debasement and government tampering with the market value of money could only cause grave economic problems:

 

Only a fool would try to separate these values in such a way that the legal price

should differ from the natural. Foolish, nay, wicked the ruler who orders that a

thing the common people value, let us say, at five should be sold for ten. Men are

guided in this matter by common estimation founded on considerations of the

quality of things, and of their abundance or scarcity. It would be vain for a Prince

to seek to undermine these principles of commerce. 'Tis best to leave them intact

instead of assailing them by force to the public detriment.

 

Mariana begins De Monetae with a charming and candid apologia for writing the book reminiscent of the great Swedish economist Knut Wicksell over two and a half centuries later: he knows that his criticism of the king courted great unpopularity, but everyone is now groaning under the hardships resulting from the debasement, and yet no one has had the courage to criticize the king's action publicly. Hence, justice requires that at least one man Mariana - should move in to express the common grievance publicly. When a combination of fear and bribery conspire to silence critics, there should be at least one man in the country who knows the truth and has the courage to point it out to one and all.

 

Mariana then proceeds to demonstrate that debasement is a very heavy hidden tax on the private property of his subjects, and that, pace his political theory, no king has the right to impose taxes without the consent of the people. Since political power originated with the people, the king has no rights over the private property of his subjects, nor can he appropriate their wealth by his whim and will. Mariana notes the papal bull Coena Domini, which had decreed the excommunication of any ruler who imposes new taxes. Mariana reasons that any king who practises debasement should incur the same punishment, as should any legal monopoly imposed by the state without the consent of the people. Under such monopolies, the state itself, or its grantee, can sell a product to the public at a price higher than its market worth, and this is surely nothing but a tax.

 

Mariana also set forth a history of debasement and its unfortunate effects; and he pointed out that governments are supposed to maintain all standards of weight and measure, not only of money, and that their record in adulterating those standards is most disgraceful. Castile, for example, had changed its measures of oil and wine, in order to levy a hidden tax, and this led to great confusion and popular unrest.

 

Mariana's book attacking the king's debasement of the currency led the monarch to haul the aged (73-year-old) scholar into prison, charging him with the high crime of lese-majeste. The judges convicted Mariana of this crime against the king, but the pope refused to punish him, and Mariana was finally released from prison after four months on the condition that he would cut out the offensive passages in his work, and that he would be more careful in the future.

 

King Philip and his minions, however, did not leave the fate of the book to an eventual change of heart on the part of Mariana. Instead, the king ordered his officials to buy up every published copy of De Monetae Mutatione they could get their hands on and to destroy them. Not only that; after Mariana's death, the Spanish Inquisition expurgated the remaining copies, deleted many sentences and smeared entire pages with ink. All non-expurgated copies were put on the Spanish Index, and these in turn were expurgated during the seventeenth century. As a result of this savage campaign of censorship, the existence of the Latin text of this important booklet remained unknown for 250 years, and was only rediscovered because the Spanish text was incorporated into a nineteenth century collection of classical Spanish essays. Hence, few complete copies of the booklet survive, of which the only one in the United States is in the Boston Public Library.

 

The venerable Mariana was apparently not in enough trouble; after he was jailed by the king, the authorities seized his notes and papers, and found there a manuscript attacking the existing governing powers in the Society of Jesus. An individualist unafraid to think for himself, Mariana clearly took little stock in the Jesuit ideal of the society as a tightly disciplined military-like body. In this booklet, Discurso de las Enfermedades de fa Compania, Molina smote the Jesuit Order fore and aft, its administration and its training of novices, and he judged his superiors in the Jesuit Order unfit to rule. Above all, Mariana criticized the military-like hierarchy; the general, he concluded, has too much power, and the provincials and other Jesuits too little. Jesuits, he asserted, should at least have a voice in the selection of their immediate superiors.

 

When the Jesuit general, Claudius Aquaviva, found that copies of Mariana's work were circulating in a kind of underground samizdat both inside and outside the order, he ordered Mariana to apologize for the scandal. The feisty and principled Mariana, however, refused to do so, and Aquaviva did not press the issue. As soon as Mariana died, the legion of enemies of the Jesuit Order published the Discurso simultaneously in French, Latin and Italian. As in the case of all bureaucratic organizations, the Jesuits then and since were more concerned about the scandal and not washing dirty linen in public than in fostering freedom of inquiry, self-criticism, or correcting any evils that Mariana might have uncovered. 

 

The Jesuit Order never expelled their eminent member nor did he ever leave. Still he was all his life regarded as a feisty trouble-maker, and as unwilling to bow to orders or peer pressure. Father Antonio Astrain, in his history of the Jesuit Order, notes that 'above all we must bear in mind that his [Mariana's] character was very rough and unmortified'.5 Personally, in a manner similar to the Italian Franciscan saints San Bernardino and Sant'Antonino of the fifteenth century, Mariana was ascetic and austere. He never attended the theatre and he held that priests and monks should never degrade their sacred character by listening to actors. He also denounced the popular Spanish sport of bull-fighting, which was also not calculated to increase his popularity. Gloomily, Mariana would often stress that life was short, precarious, and full of vexation. Yet, despite his austerity, Father Juan de Mariana possessed a sparkling, almost Menckenesque, wit. Thus his oneliner on marriage: 'Some one cleverly said that the first and the last day of marriage are desirable, but that the rest are terrible' .

 

But probably his wittiest remark concerned bull-fighting. His attack on that sport met with the objection that some theologians had defended the validity of bull-fighting. Denouncing theologians who palliated crimes by inventing explanations to please the masses, Mariana delivered a line closely anticipating a favourite remark by Ludwig von Mises on economists over three and a half centuries later: 'there is nothing howsoever absurd which is not defended by some theologian' .

Thomas Sowell analisa as políticas de ação afirmativa ao redor do mundo

"Há uma tentativa desesperada de manter a pobreza, por parte de quem lucra com ela. As pessoas reclamam que os recursos naturais se esgotaram. Pobreza é um recurso natural de uma classe de ativistas políticos e comunitários e ver a pobreza se acabando na frente deles deve ser muito alarmante." (Thomas Sowell)

Private School Philanthropy

One notable feature of the private unaided schools in our study is that, although they charge fees and are run on business principles, they also offer free or concessionary (reduced fee) seats to some children. We specifically asked questions about this aspect of private school operation on the school and parent questionnaires as well as in interviews with a small number of parents and school managers. 

[...]Of those schools giving information, 71 percent of unrecognized and 78 percent of recognized private unaided schools offer free places to some students. Regarding concessionary places, 84 percent of unrecognized and 83 percent of recognized private unaided schools offer them. The total number of free seats given was 2,978 (1,731 in unrecognized and 1,247 in recognized private unaided schools), and the total number of concessionary places was 4,768 (2,992 in unrecognized and 1,776 in recognized private unaided schools). 

Out of a total of 43,852 children attending the private unaided schools (i.e., all the schools, including those that don’t offer free or concessionary places), 2,978 were given free seats and 4,768 had concessionary seats. That is, at least 6.8 percent had free places,and 10.9 percent had concessionary seats. Altogether, at least 17.7 percent of children in private unaided schools had free or concessionary places provided for them. Note that these figures do not include schools that didnot report information, so the results should be taken as a low estimate of the actual number of free or concessionary seats. 

Why do private unaided schools offer free or concessionary places? We asked a small number of school managers. Their reasons included such things as the following: “To keep the drop-out rate from increasing.” “To help the poorest parents by providing education at the cheapest rates.” “To uplift the standard of education by offering services to the poorest in the slum areas.” “To help the poor[est] among the poor without any return from them.” “To gain a good reputation for the school within the community.” 

The last answer illustrates that giving free or concessionary places may not only assist those in need but can also be a valuable way of raising the profile and reputation of the school in the community. That is also the case when “very bright” children are assisted. Assisting such children helps the school improve its reputation when exam results are published. Although free or reduced-fee seats may be provided for the purpose of boosting a school’s reputation, clearly very poor families are helped as a result.

Rothbard, em

[3.1] The great depression of the fourteenth century

Most people - historians not excepted - are tempted to think of economic and cultural progress as being continuous: in every century people are better off than in the one preceding. This comforting assumption had to be given up quite early when the Dark Ages ensued after the collapse of the Roman Empire. But it was generally held that after the 'renaissance' of the eleventh century, progress in western Europe was pretty well linear and continuous 

from that point to the present day. 

It took heroic efforts over many decades for economic historians like Professors Armando Sapori and Robert Sabatino Lopez to finally convince the historical profession that there was a grave

secular decline in most of western Europe from approximately 1300 to the

middle of the fifteenth century; a period which might be called the Late

Middle Ages or the Early Renaissance. This secular decline, mistitled a

'depression', permeated most parts of western Europe with the exception of a

few Italian city-states.

The economic decline was marked by a severe drop in population. Since

the eleventh century, economic growth and prosperity had pulled up population

figures. Total population in western Europe, estimated at

24 million in

the year 1000 AD, had vaulted to 54 million by the year 1340. In little over a

century, from 1340 to 1450, however, the western European population fell

from 54 million to 37 million, a 31 per cent drop in only a century.

The successful battle to establish the fact of the great decline has done

little, however, to establish the cause or causes of this debacle. Focus on the

devastation caused by outbreaks of the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth

century is partially correct, but superficial, for these outbreaks were themselves

partly caused by an economic breakdown and fall in living standards

which began earlier in the century. The causes of the great depression of

western Europe can be summed up in one stark phrase: the newly imposed

domination of the state. During the medieval synthesis of the High Middle

Ages there was a balance between the power of Church and state, with the

Church slightly more powerful. In the fourteenth century that balance was

broken, and the nation-state came to hold sway, breaking the power of the

Church, taxing, regulating, controlling and wreaking devastation through

virtually continuous war for over a century (the Hundred Years' War, from

1337 to 1453).1

The first and critically most important step in the rise in the power of the

state at the expense of crippling the economy was the destruction of the fairs

of Champagne. During the High Middle Ages, the fairs of Champagne were

the main mart for international trade, and the hub of local and international

commerce. These fairs had been carefully nurtured by being made free zones,

untaxed or unregulated by the French kings or nobles, while justice was

swiftly and efficiently meted out by competing private and merchants' courts.

68 Economic thought before Adam Smith

The fairs of Champagne reached their peak during the thirteenth century, and

provided the centre for land-based trade over the Alps from northern Italy,

bearing goods from afar.

Then, in the early fourteenth century, Philip IV, the Fair, king of France

(1285-1314), moved to tax, plunder, and effectively destroy the vitally important

fairs of Champagne. To finance his perpetual dynastic wars, Philip

levied a stiff sales tax on the Champagne fairs. He also destroyed domestic

capital and finance by repeated confiscatory levies on groups or organizations

with money. In 1308, he destroyed the wealthy Order of the Templars, confiscating

their funds for the royal treasury. Philip then turned to impose a series

of crippling levies and confiscations on Jews and northern Italians ('Lombards')

prominent at the fairs: in 1306, 1311, 1315, 1320 and 1321. Furthermore, at

war with the Flemings, Philip broke the long-time custom that all merchants

were welcome at the fairs, and decreed the exclusion of the Flemings. The

result of these measures was a rapid and permanent decline of the fairs of

Champagne and of the trading route over the Alps. Desperately, the Italian

city-states began to reconstitute trade routes and sail around the Straits of

Gibraltar to Bruges, which began to flourish even though the rest of Flanders

was in decay.

It was particularly fateful that Philip the Fair inaugurated the system of

regular taxation in France. Before then, there were no regular taxes. In the

medieval era, while the king was supposed to be all-powerful in his own

sphere, that sphere was restricted by the sanctity of private property. The king

was supposed to be an armed enforcer and upholder of the law, and his

revenues were supposed to derive from rents on royal lands, feudal dues and

tolls. There was nothing that we would call regular taxation. In an emergency,

such as an invasion or the launching of a crusade, the prince, in

addition to invoking the feudal duty of fighting on his behalf, might ask his

vassals for a subsidy; but that aid would be requested rather than ordered, and

be limited in duration to the emergency period.

The perpetual wars of the fourteenth and the first half of the fifteenth

centuries began in the 1290s, when Philip the Fair, taking advantage of King

Edward I of England's war with Scotland and Wales, seized the province of

Gascony from England. This launched a continuing warfare between England

and Flanders on the one side, and France on the other, and led to a

desperate need for funds by both the English and the French Crowns.

The merchants and capitalists at the fairs of Champagne might have money,

but the largest and most tempting source for royal plunder was the Catholic

Church. Both the English and French monarchs proceeded to tax the Church,

which brought them into a collision course with the pope. Pope Boniface VIII

(1294-1303) stoutly resisted this new form of pillage, and prohibited the

monarchs from taxing the Church. King Edward reacted by denying justice in

From Middle Ages to Renaissance 69

the royal courts to the Church, while Philip was more militant by prohibiting

the transfer of Church revenue from France to Rome. Boniface was forced to

retreat and to allow the tax, but his bull

Unam Sanctam (1302) insisted that

temporal authority must be subordinate to the spiritual. That was enough for

Philip, who boldly seized the pope in Italy and prepared to try him for heresy,

a trial only cut off by the death of the aged Boniface. At this point Philip the

Fair seized the papacy itself, and brought the seat of the Roman Catholic

Church from Rome to Avignon, where he proceeded to designate the pope

himself. For virtually the entire fourteenth century, the pope, in his 'Babylonian

captivity', was an abject tool of the French king; the pope only returned to

Italy in the early fifteenth century.

In this way, the once mighty Catholic Church, dominant power and spiritual

authority during the High Middle Ages, had been brought low and made

a virtual vassal of the royal plunderer of France.

The decline of Church authority, then, was matched by the rise in the

power of the absolute state. Not content with confiscating, plundering, taxing,

crushing the fairs of Champagne, and bringing the Catholic Church

under his heel, Philip the Fair also obtained revenue for his eternal wars by

debasement of the coinage and thereby generated a secular inflation.

The wars of the fourteenth century did not cause a great deal of

direct

devastation: armies were small and hostilities were intermittent. The main

devastation came from the heavy taxes and from the monetary inflation and

borrowing to finance the eternal royal adventures. The enormous increase of

taxation was the most crippling aspect of the wars. The expenses of war:

recruitment of the modestly sized army; payments of its wages; supplies; and

fortifications - all cost from two- to fourfold the ordinary expenses of the

Crown. Add to that the' high costs of tax assessment and enforcement and the

cost of the loans, and the crippling burden of war taxation becomes all too

clear.

The new taxes were everywhere. We have seen the grave effect of taxes on

the Church; on a large monastic farm, they often absorbed over 40 per cent of

the net profits of the farm. A uniform poll tax of one shilling, levied by the

English Crown in 1380, inflicted great hardship on peasants and craftsmen.

The tax amounted to one month's wages for agricultural workers and one

week's wages for urban labourers; moreover, since many poor workers and

peasants were paid in kind rather than money, amassing the money to pay the

tax was particularly difficult.

Other new taxes levied were

ad valorem on all transactions; taxes on

wholesale and retail beverages; and levies on salt and wool. To combat

evasion of the tax, the governments established monopoly markets for the

sale of salt in France and 'staple points' for English wool. The taxes restricted

supply and raised prices, crippling the critical English wool trade.

70 Economic thought before Adam Smith

Production and trade were hampered further by massive requisitions levied

by the kings, thus causing a drastic fall of income and wealth, as well as

bankruptcies among the producers. In short, consumers suffered from artificially

high prices and producers from low returns, with the king bleeding the

economy of the differential. Government borrowing was scarcely more helpful,

leading to repeated defaults by the kings and consequent heavy losses

and bankruptcies among the private bankers unwise enough to lend to the

government.

Originating as a response to wartime 'emergency', the new taxes tended to

become permanent: not only because the warfare lasted for over a century,

but because the state, always on the lookout for an increase in its income and

power, seized upon the golden opportunity to convert wartime taxes into a

permanent part of the national heritage.

From the middle to the end of the fourteenth century, Europe was struck

with the devastating pandemic of the Black Death - the bubonic plague which

in the short span of

1348-50 wiped out fully one-third of the population.

The Black Death was largely the consequence of people's lowered

living standards caused by the great depression and the resulting ··loss of

resistance to disease. The plague continued to recur, though not in such

virulent form, in every decade of the century.

Such are the great recuperative powers of the human race that this enormous

tragedy caused virtually no lasting catastrophic social or psychological

effects among the European population. In a sense, the longest-lasting ill

effect from the Black Death was the response of the English Crown in

imposing permanent maximum wage control and compulsory labour rationing

upon English society. The sudden decline of population and consequent

doubling of wage rates was met by the government's severe imposition of

maximum wage control in the Ordinance of

1349 and the Statue of Labourers

of 1351. Maximum wage control was established at the behest of the employing

classes: large, middle and small landlords, and master craftsmen, the

former groups in particular alarmed at the rise of agricultural wage rates. The

ordinance and the statute defied economic law by attempting to enforce

maximum wage control at the old pre-plague levels. The inevitable result,

however, was a grave shortage of labour, since at the statutory maximum

wage the demand for labour was enormously greater than the newly scarce

supply.

Every government intervention creates new problems in the course of vain

attempts to solve the old. The government is then confronted with the choice:

pile on new interventions to solve the inexplicable new problems, or repeal

the original intervention. Government's instinct, of course, is to maximize its

wealth and power by adding new interventions. So did the English Statute of

Labourers, which imposed forced labour at the old wage rates for all men in

From Middle Ages to Renaissance 71

England under the age of 60; restricted the mobility of labour, declaring that

the lord of a particular territory had first claim on a man's labour; and made it

a criminal offence for an employer to hire a worker who had left a former

master. In that way, the English government engaged in labour rationing to

try to freeze labourers at their pre-plague occupations at pre-plague wages.

This forced rationing of labour cut against the natural inclination of men to

leave for more employment at better wages, and so the inevitable rise of

black markets for labour made enforcement of the statutes difficult. The

desperate English Crown tried once again, in the Cambridge Statute of 1388,

to make the rationing more rigorous. Labour mobility of any sort was prohibited

without written permission from local justices, and compulsory child

labour was imposed in agriculture. But there was continual evasion of this

compulsory buyers' cartel, especially by large employers, who were particularly

eager and able to pay higher wage rates. The cumbersome English

judicial machinery was totally ineffective in enforcing the legislation, although

the monopolistic urban guilds (monopolies enforced by government)

were able to partially enforce wage control in the cities.

3.2 Absolutism and nominalism: the break-up of Thomism

Along with the rise of the absolute state, theories of absolutism arose and

began to throw natural law doctrines into the shade. The adoption of natural

law theory, after all, meant that the state was bound to limit itself to the

dictates of the natural or the divine law. But new political theorists arose,

asserting the dominance of the temporal over the spiritual, and of the state's

positive law over the natural or divine order.